Far-Out City : Quirkiness Comes With the Territory in Relatively New Santa Clarita

Barely three years after founding the city of Santa Clarita, officials of the bedroom community near Magic Mountain jumped on a suggestion that more seasoned politicians might have mocked.

They invited 50 hairdressers to lunch.

Turning the City Council chambers into something resembling the set of a TV show, they became the audience to a panel of beauticians and a wisecracking host-cum-assistant city manager trailing a microphone cord and reading from a corny script.

Hairdressers, they figured, know what people are really talking about, and so should the city’s leaders.

“Everyone talks to their beauty professionals,” Councilman Carl Boyer III said at the time. “We’d just like to know the kinds of things people are saying.”

Teasing gossip out of hairdressers is one of several quirky ideas to pop up since the city of 114,000--located 35 miles north of Los Angeles--established itself in a blaze of suburban populism four years ago.

Consider former Councilman Howard (Buck) McKeon’s fondness for bright red. Miffed at the council for refusing to use it in the city’s blue and green logo, McKeon--who did not run for reelection--a somberly clad bank chairman who resembles the farmer in the painting “American Gothic,” insisted that Santa Clarita’s fleet of 11 new buses be painted candy-apple red. The council went along, adding magenta and oak trees blowing in the wind. (The color scheme hasn’t stopped complaints about bus service.)

Or take Councilwoman Jan Heidt, a bookstore owner who reads greeting-card-level poetry (“I Know Something Good About You/You Know Something Good About Me”) or passes out pop psychology exercises when it is her turn to lead the pre-meeting prayer.

Or Boyer’s proposal, quickly scuttled, to change every address in the 43-square-mile city to remedy what he says is an illogical numbering system. It would have required changing 60,500 addresses, and even Boyer’s wife and children have pleaded with him to drop the idea, he said, vowing to carry on.

Unorthodox behavior is said to be typical of amateur politicians, particularly in newly founded cities, regardless of their place on the political spectrum. Year-old Malibu, toward the liberal end of the spectrum, in January took the unusual and legally pointless step of declaring the waters off the coastline a marine mammal sanctuary.

“We can joke about it, but it’s refreshing that in an era of spin doctors we have politicians laying themselves on the line,” said Sheldon Kamieniecki, a political science professor at USC. “I’m not sure how good it is to lose that naivete, because politicians with a great deal of political experience can become deceptive.”

Not all new cities are hotbeds of weirdness. Diamond Bar, incorporated in the San Gabriel Valley about the same time as Santa Clarita, has stepped outside the boring and predictable only once, when it hired a city manager in violation of the state law against closed meetings.

Santa Clarita is rock-solid Republican when it comes to state and national politics. About 68% of the voters supported George Bush in the 1988 presidential election. But conservatism defined as a tendency to oppose change, as the dictionary puts it, stops at the city limits.

City Manager George Caravalho says the city’s unofficial motto is “If it ain’t broke, break it,” and he approves. He was the one who suggested the hairdresser lunch.

He was also behind holding an annual Halloween costume contest at City Hall. Each department spends two weeks feverishly picking a theme and planning costumes.

Last year the Finance Department dressed as cannibals. They had vats of raw liver that gave off fake smoke. Caravalho was a pirate. He looked sort of like Yul Brynner in “The King and I.”

Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy, an aide to County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, is not exactly puckish, although she did once suggest that the city print flyers telling illegal immigrants that there were no jobs in Santa Clarita.

But she says, approvingly, “People here have never been afraid to speak their minds,” and she is an old-timer, having been active in the local independence movement.

It began in the 1970s when the Santa Clarita Valley began feeling the effects of rapid growth. Fed by the promise of good schools and cheap housing, the population in the valley more than tripled from about 15,000 people in 1960 to about 50,000 in 1970. During the next two decades it has more than tripled again, to about 151,000.

As bulldozers turned onion fields into housing tracts, activists tried twice--in 1976 and 1978--to pass a ballot measure establishing a separate county in the area, called Canyon County. In 1987 cityhood was granted to a much smaller portion of the valley than activists had proposed. Now they can do it their way. And they do.

McKeon pushed for a red logo when he was on the council because he read in the 1957 Vance Packard book “The Hidden Persuaders” that people notice red. The council surrendered to his crimson passion when it came time to select a color scheme for the city buses.

Another Red, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, was not acquired. Gorbachev never answered McKeon’s invitation to speak at a 1989 city-sponsored symposium on government. (Now he’s out of government and no longer a Red.)

The city’s home address system caused Boyer so much distress that in 1990 he proposed replacing it. As a prelude to his presentation to the council, he produced a handful of marbles from his coat pocket and held them up. “Before we start, I’d like to show everyone I still got them,” he said.

Boyer does not think current street numbers give enough information, such as whether a place is north or south of the center of town or how close two places are to each other. He would like to assign every street a new set of numbers, starting with 1. There would be a five-year grace period with one number on the curb and one on the building.

Only Heidt supported his proposal, and the plan died at council headquarters, 23920 Valencia Blvd.

An iconoclast in her own right, Heidt once placed a peddler who was selling his wares outside her bookstore under citizen’s arrest and held him until the police arrived.

Heidt has also refused to lead traditional prayers because of her belief in the separation of church and state. Instead, she recently gave the audience and her colleagues a psychology exercise that asked, “Who annoys you? List five of their names and what you find most annoying about them. Now take those same people . . . and find something positive to say. Even a small thing will do.

“I wanted to call attention to the fact that people don’t treat each other that well these days,” she says. The audience, perhaps jaded by unceasing innovation, barely stirred.

Responding to a campaign to save rain forests in South America, Asia and Africa, Santa Clarita’s council joined a handful of U.S. cities and states last year in banning city government use of 43 tropical hardwoods.

It declined to adopt Heidt’s suggestion that it ban veal to prevent mistreatment of calves.

It embraced prunes, applying for and winning a grant from the California Prune Board to help persuade consumers to eat the fruit and take brisk walks. The city got $1,000 and 600 packages of prunes to distribute at city events.

Academics who have thought deeply about such matters are not surprised.

“All sorts of outlandish ideas can be proposed in instant cities like Santa Clarita, where there’s no entrenched power structure,” said Peter Morrison, a demographer for the RAND Corp.

The city can afford to be innovative because of the absence of serious municipal problems, said Sheri Erlewine, spokeswoman for the League of California Cities.

Santa Clarita has a balanced budget and a median household income of $44,825. It enjoys the third-lowest reported crime rate among 179 American cities with 100,000 or more residents.

“If Santa Clarita were laying off police officers, believe me, hairdresser luncheons wouldn’t go over big,” Erlewine said.

Santa Claritans do not seem to mind their leaders’ oddness, as long as officials seriously strive to protect them from hated urban incursions such as job-hunting illegal immigrants and a dump that the county wants to create a mile away.

“We’re all amateurs up here and learning from our mistakes,” said Pat Saletore, president of the Santa Clarita Civic Assn. “Their hearts are in the right place, even if their feet aren’t always.”

In a bedroom community with only two movie complexes and one bowling alley, eccentric political behavior fills some people’s need for entertainment, said John Drew, a political scientist at College of the Canyons.

“I get worried when people take themselves too seriously,” said Drew. He fits the mold of public figures. In his campaign on behalf of a slow-growth initiative, he challenged its opponents to a chili cook-off.

Another possible explanation of tolerance is apathy. Consistent with its populist self-image, the city holds scads of public meetings. City Hall was kept open late a few nights a week at first, in the hopes that commuters would stop by. But the civic meetings do not overflow, and the town hall was soon closed at sunset.

By the municipal election in 1990, only about 17% of the voters turned out, a steep decline from the 1987 cityhood vote, in which 44% cast ballots. A hotly debated slow-growth initiative on Tuesday’s ballot generated more interest, with about 32% of the electorate turning out to defeat it. One hundred residents who did attend a public planning session recently put construction of a Nordstrom department store near the top of a wish list--ahead of more schools and better air. Possibly they simply knew the difference between what they can change and what they must accept.

City spokeswoman Gail Foy says plans are in the works to establish a forum that could take the council’s quirkiness directly to the people: televised meetings preceded by a half-hour talk show.

But Santa Clarita is likely to become “just an ordinary place” with the passage of time, said Gunther Barth, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of a book about instant cities. “They should enjoy their kookiness while it lasts,” he said.